The article starts with the comparison of DSPy and LangChain monthly downloads and then wastes time comparing DSPy to hand-rolling basic infra, which is quite trivial in every barely mature setup.

I conjecture that the core value proposition of DSPy is its optimizer? Yet the article doesn't really touch it in any important way. How does it work? How would I integrate it into my production? Is it even worth it for usual use-cases? Adding a retry is not a problem, creating and maintaining an AI control plane is. LangChain provides services for observability, online and offline evaluation, prompt engineering, deployment, you name it.